IF YOU CAN’T LOVE YOURSELF, HOW’N HELL YOU GONNA LOVE SOMEONE ELSE?

Variety is the spice of life; the world would be so dull if everything was the same. Differences are beautiful and make us unique, so why don’t we celebrate our differences when it comes to our appearance?

I’m a firm believer of inner beauty and the fact that people’s goodness will shine through. I’ve met many a ‘beautiful’ person whose beauty quickly diminished after I’d realised they had a rotten personality. I don’t think there are any ugly people in this world, just ugly souls and actions.

You don’t need to change anything about yourself. We need to stop trying to mould ourselves into someone else or fit an unrealistic ideal. You might look at yourself and spot imperfections, but for every ‘flaw’ you chose to celebrate, you make someone who is insecure about the same thing feel better about themselves. If we all embraced our ‘flaws’ then there would be no such thing as a flaw, just lots of variety.

Companies insist on making us loathe ourselves and invent new flaws every day so we spend more money trying to ‘fix’ ourselves (lots of sarcastic speech marks in this post). It’s 2017 and people are getting designer vaginas for God’s sake! I know that people can do what they like, but it worries me that cosmetic surgery has almost become normalised. I fear for my younger sister growing up in such an image focused world.

Weird analogy: imagine if having one huge foot was the new ideal for women and every single woman got a foot job and eventually it was more uncommon to NOT have one large foot? We’d all look the same and people would expect every woman to have one giant foot. Girls would grow up thinking it was just a normal part of growing up and they’d have a surgical ‘rite of passage’ to get the giant foot of their dreams. I know this is a silly example but it illustrates my point. We shouldn’t be uniform, we should all be different. Children aren’t born hating their bodies, they only start to believe this once they’ve been exposed to social pressures and the media.

I’m trying to reclaim my ‘flaws’. Every time I look in the mirror, instead of telling myself that I hate certain parts of my body, I focus on the things I love and think about how lucky I am to have a body that allows me to experience life. This extends to mental health too, I am trying to silence my inner critic, the one that tells me I am not good enough or I will fail at everything I try.

Sure, this is all easier said than done. Everyone has days where they want to change themselves, I have days where I see a horrible photo of myself and think ‘Fuck it! I’m getting a loan to pay for veneers.” but that’s all part of being human and it’s ok.

As my saviour and all time hero, Ru Paul said, ‘HONEY, IF YOU CAN’T LOVE YOURSELF, HOW’N HELL YOU GONNA LOVE SOMEONE ELSE?’

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